Datasets

GlobalReg is currently working on the creation of a single and consistent dataset of regulatory agencies. Building on a non-nested structure of data or two-way cross-classification (Jordana & Levi-Faur 2005, Park & Jensen 2007), regulatory agencies are observed at two overlapping categories of attributes: countries and sectors. To the extent that every unit shares characteristics with the units of the same country and the same sector, the analysis will be based on the variation observed across countries and across sectors. In this sense, one of the main specificities of the dataset is that the units are clustered in non-nested structures in the context of hierarchical/multilevel modelling.

Within the project, regulatory agencies are defined as organizational units clearly and formally separated from a departmental and/or ministerial structure or from a wider public bureaucracy, irrespective of the existence or not of hierarchical links between them and the executive or legislative branches. Moreover, regulatory agencies must fulfil particular criteria:

Focus should be on regulatory tasks and activities – namely, rule supervision, rule enhancement, and rule definition, among others

Stable and public entities, regulated by public legal acts and ordinances, and performing hence public tasks, being their employees, public servants, and their budget under public control

National scope

GlobalReg dataset is intended to provide systematic and comparable information on different dimensions of regulatory agencies, including the year of creation, basic organizational and institutional variables, and major institutional transformations, for countries over 100,000 million US$ of GDP and/or over 10 million inhabitants. The sectors under scrutiny include Competition, Electricity, Environment, Financial Services, Food Safety, Gas, Health Services, Insurance, Nuclear Energy, Pensions, Pharmaceutics, Postal Services, Security & Exchange, Telecommunications, Water, and Work Safety.

The construction of the database relies on the information available on the websites of the regulatory agencies regarding their characteristics and institutional features, being this information meticulously scrutinized and juxtaposed against legal documents.

Publicly Available Datasets

In addition to the data that is being gathered for the development of the project, the GlobalReg project has also datasets available from the following researches:

The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies

Dataset and Codebook for the article "The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies: Channels of Transfer and Stages of Diffusion", by Jacint Jordana, David Levi-Faur and Xavier Fernández-i-Marín.